Apple’s New Campus Could Hurt Recruiting Efforts

Is Silicon Valley not the “in” place to be anymore? As more tech companies set up shop in San Francisco, Wired wonders whether Apple’s proposed “spaceship” headquarters could be a boondoggle.

The circular, 2.8-million-square-foot glass showplace received final approval from the Cupertino City Council in November and should open in mid-2016. Expected to house up to 14,200 employees, the project’s original estimated cost of $3 billion has nearly doubled. But, notes the magazine’s Marcus Wohlsen, Silicon Valley’s talent is heading north.

Increasingly, young tech talent wants to live and work in cities. As a result, the hottest tech companies, from Google to Twitter to Uber, are setting up shop in San Francisco … In the cutthroat world of tech recruiting, catering to the demands of the talent is everything, and even Apple isn’t immune to the first rule of real estate: location, location, location.

Consumer technology dominates the tech scene in San Francisco, while companies in Silicon Valley are more focused on enterprise hardware and software, Wohlsen observes.

In 2010, the Brookings Institution noted more than 43 percent of Americans with bachelor’s degrees lived in 20 metropolitan areas, including Seattle, San Francisco and Raleigh, N.C. – all tech hubs, perhaps by no coincidence.

“To be sure, Silicon Valley will remain a tech hub, but the point remains: The balance is shifting. And Apple is putting all its eggs in a mile-wide spaceship-like basket,” Wohlsen says.

On the other hand, Apple has one big advantage: It’s Apple. In the end, the question will be whether that’s enough.

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Comments

That is BS. People go to SF for the jobs that are there. The enamor for big cities goes away very quickly when you get mugged or raped or you start thinking about kids and schools. If you want the average age of your employees to be 24, or you want 90% of your workforce to be gay, that is a different matter.

Speak for yourself. Crime happens anywhere you go. Most of the jobs are in good areas of the city anyway. The suburbs and country have their good parts and bad parts too. If you want any kind of convenience, not be at the mercy of traffic and the mechanic, want some kind of life outside of the mall or some franchise restaurant turned bar at night the city is the place to be.

I will agree with you on schools, but in general good schools are tough to get into anyway.

No thanks. I’ve lived in the far reaches of Flushing (NYC) and that was bad enough. I’ve also lived in the middle of Bum-squat Nowhere (one mile from the Canadian border), so I have some sense of the range of options. I’d rather be in the far outer fringes of the suburbs, far from the stinky smelly city. Of course, the Hudson Valley in NY doesn’t have jobs anyway.

It’s true. Lots of tech workers are moving to SF. I was one of them and I can tell you the city is pretty safe. The reason this won’t hurt Apple is that they have tons of busses that you can take from all parts of the city that bring you directly to the campus. They’re comfy, have WiFi and you can work while you commute.

Of course housing is expensive in SF and in the entire Valley, so most families move to the suburbs for cheaper real estate, not due to crime.